By Margaret Groarke
Last semester, I read the two stories linked below, about a New Jersey high school teacher and his AP government and politics students. Frustrated by the difficulties they faced researching cold murder cases from the Civil Rights era, they drafted a bill to make it easier to access this information, and successfully pushed to have it passed by Congress.
As you can see in the Columbia Journalism Review article, the AP class research project grew out of teacher Stuart Wexler's own research project. Over several years, successive AP classes contributed to the project, and upon their graduation, passed it on to the next class.
Many times we think of community engaged learning as a kind of periodic service activity, but the research and advocacy these students did is an excellent example of community engaged learning -- the students contributed to the scholars, family members and communities who longed to resolve these long-ago murders, and they learned a great deal about how government bureaucracy and the legislative process work.
Tom Jackman, "From Students in high school all the way to the president's desk" Washington Post, February 23, 2018.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/02/23/students-high-school-all-way-presidents-desk-how-government-class-fought-release-unsolved-fbi-civil-rights-case-files/?utm_term=.65fdd27ad546
Alexandra Neason, "Bill by New Jersey Students aims to open Civil Rights cold cases," Columbia Journalism Review, April 24, 2018.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/bill-by-new-jersey-students-aims-to-open-civil-rights-cold-cases.php
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